Remembering Jay Clayton
October 28, 1941 – December 31, 2023
A tribute to the innovative and versatile jazz singer
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Jazz singer and educator Jay Clayton passed away on Dec. 31, 2023 at the age of 82.
She was born as Judith Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941 in Youngstown, Ohio and early on played accordion and piano.
Clayton studied classical music at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio but was always primarily interested in the freedom of jazz.
She moved to New York City in 1963 where she had an office job during the day while going out at night to see the most adventurous musicians and work on her singing.
Clayton became part of the avant-garde jazz scene (she was one of its first singers) and performed with such notables as Muhal Richard Abrams, Gary Bartz, Jane Ira Bloom, George Cables, Steve Lacy, and even John Cage.
She was the artistic director for the first Woman In Jazz Festival in 1979, in 1982 started to build the jazz program at the Cornish College of the Arts, and she was a member of its jazz faculty for 20 years.
A beloved educator who helped many up-and-coming singers, Jay Clayton also had a busy solo career, balancing adventurous explorations with her personal versions of standards, all of it interpreted with creativity and wit.
Along the way she led over a dozen albums and recorded with Abrams, Bob Mover, Paul McCandless, Vocal Summit, Don Lanphere, the String Trio of New York, Jerry Granelli, Lee Konitz, and Fred Hersch (the duo album Beautiful Love).
She was active until stricken by lung cancer in 2021.
Joined by an unidentified pianist and bassist, Jay Clayton puts plenty of feeling into her version of the ballad “You’ll Never Know” in 2014.
-Scott Yanow
